Detached Observation Quotes

Awareness is observation without choice, condemnation, or justification. Awareness is silent observation from which there arises understanding without the experiencer and the experienced. In this awareness, which is passive, the problem or the cause is given an opportunity to unfold itself and so give its full significance. In awareness there is no end in view to be gained, and there is no becoming, the 'me' and the 'mine' not being given the continuity.

[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

I was in the army, and to me it was like a newsreel.

I like to think of myself as an observer.

In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan.

It is better not to call anything to anybody - just remain centered in yourself. Look at the world and drop judgments, and you will have such a pure atmosphere around you - no appreciation, no condemnation, just a pure watchfulness. This watchfulness, I call meditation.

I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.

It is within our power not to make a judgement about something, and so not disturb our minds; for nothing in itself possesses the power to form our judgements.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.

... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

We have to learn to go beyond both a positive mind and a negative mind to become a silent, nonjudgmental, non-analytical, non-interpretiv e mind. In other words, the silent witness. In the process of silent witnessing, we experience inner silence. In the purity of silence, we feel connected to our source and to everything else.

Some people see me as dissecting my characters in some kind of heartless, coldblooded, analytical way, when in truth making these movies is a passionate, intensely emotional experience for me. I'm detached from the characters only to the degree that I have to be in order to write honestly about them.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Study everything, join nothing.

Critics should be to actors what ornithologists are to birds: they can write all they want, but it shouldn't affect them.

In the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning - in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around; just you have to put your mind aside.

Attachment is the food for the mind to continue. Non-attached witnessing is the way to stop it without any effort to stop it. And when you start enjoying those blissful moments, your capacity to retain them for longer periods arises.

I once read that the only way to enjoy life is to observe everything with a sense of detached amusement. I don't always do that, but it serves you well to keep it in mind.

Watch the functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you can gain insight into your own behavior.

I tend not to meet the people I write about because I'm not really interested in the people I write about as people. I don't want to know about their family life. I don't want to know about their bad habits or their good deeds. I'm interested in their work.